Tag: yellowface

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Fiction

Talk about an unlikeable, delusional main character!! When June Hayward’s loose friend and literary darling Athena Liu dies suddenly, June steals her latest manuscript and finishes it herself under a pen name. What follows is a darkly humorous exploration of cultural appropriation, racism, and June’s utter lack of accountability.

Athena’s books focused on the trauma of her Chinese characters, a niche she felt pressured by the publishing industry to play into time and time again. June, writing under the name Juniper, leaves her race ambiguous and only tells anyone she is white when asked directly. Rumors begin to swirl on social media accusing her of stealing Athena’s work, kicking off a whole new cycle of crazy.

Kuang does an incredible job of writing characters who are unlikeable. She paints an uncomfortable picture of the publishing industry’s interactions with marginalized authors. Her dialogue is painfully good at getting to the heart of this story and I could not stop listening (to the audiobook). It’s cringe-worthy in a way that verges on satire.

June is so selfishly focused on her own success and using her intellect to get out of negative situations. I was holding my breath to find out what would lead to her eventual final downfall, but I never could have seen the ending coming. It left me utterly shook and continued, all the way to the last paragraph, to hammer home the themes and messages that played out through the entire book.  

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